I realize that this is a matter of opinion, but I'd like to hear from users of the product.

I imagine that there is some level of hardware that provides more firepower to run the Stellarmate app than the app requires. Or not. It might also be the case that the better the hardware, better the Stellarmate experience will be. Period.

I recently bought the Stellarmate Pro because I found that my experience with Raspberry Pis was too iffy. I have not been disappointed with that purchase. The Stellarmate pro is much more solid from the point of view of WiFi, and power provision. My thought was to use my laptop to run the SMP. And while that works, I learn that there are functions such as auto stacking which are only available in the app.

Although it's said that you can run the app on a smartphone, the experience of trying this is horrible, IMHO. Getting a tablet was always at the back of my mind, and now I'm more seriously looking at that.

So I'd appreciate the input of anyone with experience at this.
Thanks.

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Here is what my problem was, and shame on me for bothering you good folks with all these issues for the past six months!

It was a badly misaligned OTA. I'm not just talking about collimation, though that was what led me to the problem. I got to a point where the scope was (sorta) focusable, but not focusable enough to do autofocus. It was close enough to see that I had a collimation issue. After reading all the info on collimation, I tried to do it myself. I was trying to tighten a screw I couldn't budge, and the whole secondary mirror housing of my Celestron C8 SCT rotated. It was probably already looser than it should have been. Six months ago the scope had fallen in a windstorm, and I took it in for repairs which included working out a dent in the front and collimation. Likely, it needed more work than that. Yesterday, I took it into Starizona, and the fine people there dug into it, reattached the secondary mirror with a stronger gasket, cleaned it all up, collimated it and restored it to good condition. I got to see them as they worked, which was a treat, actually.

I brought it home, hooked it up, and everything worked. Autofocus quickly homed in on the right spot. Previously, it had been hit or miss. I could never make out the hyperbolic curve it was trying to find. When it actually decided what was best (which was not always the case), I found I could do better manually. And then plate-solving for alignment, whether regular alignment or polar quickly, found the right solution. The Ekos/INDI software worked great. It was my telescope hardware that was deficient.

If you should ever encounter another person like me, with the persistence to continue with this hobby over six agonizing months where nothing works as it's supposed to, it may be worth suggesting that they have their mount looked at!

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I've been urged by Jasem Mutlaq to try using the Wired option of the Celestron AUX driver to connect my StellarMate Pro to my AVX mount. I've been getting extremely flaky results of late going through my hand controller's min-USB port using the Celestron GPS driver. I have several questions the community might be able to answer.

1. How "beta" is the AUX driver? The docs say it is beta. Is anyone using it successfully?
2. Driver documentation lists five ways to connect. See screenshot. Of these, 1,4, and 5 won't work with my equipment. 2 is what I tried and it doesn't even connect. The doc describes this as in alpha testing. So probably not viable for me.

The only possibly viable approach for me would be #3. It seems that that would require me to find a RJ12-serial cable, connecting the RJ12 end to one of the mount's AUX ports and then getting a good (not the cheap kind) of serial-USB connector to connect to the USB port of the Stellarmate. Has anyone gotten this type of connection to work (not necessarily with Stellarmate) , and if so where did you obtain the cabling?

I have always felt, as a retired software engineer that connecting through the handset was a really ugly kludge. INDI has the Celestron AUX API already. Why does it need this annoying connection through the handset. I'm eager to give this a try as it's much simpler, but I don't know if it will work.

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I saw the same thing. Plate solving repeatedly failed after the first three worked that established the PA error. So had to park the mount and restart the process again and it got stuck each time in the same place.

This sounds exactly like what I experienced last night.

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Having this same issue myself 2 years later. Why is plate solving failing? Also noteworthy, I think, is that I do not have this problem in the first few captures, and then, as I gradually get closer, the plate solving fails more. Unless this can be explained somehow, I think I need to use the Move Star method, which I finally understand.

Another complaint I have with the Plate Solve method is that the Update ERR data is constantly going away. Why?? It seems like the last result would be pertinent information I want to see, more important, perhaps than the original error.

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Having solved the issues with Polar Alignment stopping after first rotation I was now in a position to actually trying to do polar alignment with my Stellarmate Pro, using the EKos PAA. I succeeded in improving my polar alignment, but I was not able to get it all the way.

I used the Plate Solve PAA method. After the initial several refreshes, and moving the altitude and azimuth knobs, the solver started failing more and more. In spite of the warning to please be patient, I thought five or six 10-second timeouts was patience enough and gave up. Made several attempts this way,(Park, Unpark, Start PAA again) all ended incomplete. I was able to get both alt and azimuth to under a degree, but not under a minute. It seemed the closer I got, the more the solver was failing. Not sure if it's something I was doing wrong, or if other options would be better. The options i used were the defaults in all cases. There are so many options to choose from, I am not sure which could be improved for my situation with my Celestron AVX mount and C8 SCT. Hopefully, someone can give me ideas to try. Would the "Move Star" method give better results? The problems I had with that was that the triangle was never completely within the displayed capture image. The Plate Solve method seemed easier.

One criticism I have with the PlateSolve PAA method is that the display shows the initial amount of error and direction of error, but the amount of error after adjustment was constantly appearing and disappearing from the screen. I don't understand why it wouldn't be a good idea to display the current amount of error as well as the initial amount of error in a stable way. It would help the user to know how much progress he has made overall.

Thanks to anyone reading this, and hopefully someone will be able to offer some suggestions.

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By performing a factory reset on my mount, this problem went away. I still did not succeed in fully polar aligning but that is a topic for another thread.
I still think better logging would help users understand this problem when it occurs.

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So we are describing the same scenario. Thanks. It seems that this has happened at least twice on two different types of mounts.

I factory-reset my mount. We will see soon if that helps.

It would be nice if the software made debug loggings of the mount position before and after these rotations. If not outright stopping the rotation if it goes past the specified angle.

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I wonder if it’s the same issue. You say it “doesn’t stop.” Do you mean it keeps on rotating? In my case the rotation stops. But the second capture never begins.

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Not sure whether to put this question here or under the Stellarmate section.

Polar Alignment is failing in an odd new way on my rig:
Celestron C8 SCT on AVX Mount
ZWO ASI533 MC camera
ZWO EAF
Stellarmate Pro 128 GB running KStars 3.7

I start the Stellarmate and open Ekos, Start INDI, everything loads
Autofocus works well, have good focus.
Now I want to Polar Align
Go to Alignment tab start polar align.

It makes the first capture and solves it
Log says Please wait until mount completes rotation to ...
It then rotates 30 degrees East as I told it to, although it seems as though it may have rotated more than 30 degrees
It never starts the second capture. It just sits there.

I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems like there is confusion between EKos and the mount itself.

I wonder if there's some setting I've mis-set in EKos, but everything looks normal.

Would it make sense to factory-reset the mount?

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